We spent 61 per cent of our office time deadling with emails, retrieving information and collaborating; and only 39 per cent actually performing tasks.

A new global report by McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of management consultancy McKinsey & Company, argues wide adoption of social media technologies by businesses could cut down some of the time-wasting involved in emailing and improve worker productivity by 20 to 25 per cent.

According to "The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technology" report, which uses IDC data, workers spend 28 per cent of their time, reading, writing or responding to email, and another 19 per cent tracking down information to complete their tasks. Communicating and collaborating internally accounts for another 14 per cent of the average working week, with only 39 per cent of the time remaining to accomplish role-specific tasks.

Social media technologies include software products and services that allow people to connect more efficiently than via email. This includes internal tweets – also known as microblogging -, blogs, posting information and documents to a feed, "liking" and "sharing" other people's posts, video and audio files. It is much like Facebook and already-existing social tools for enterprises such as Chatter, by Salesforce.com, and Yammer, now owned by Microsoft.

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Other social and Web2.0 tools such as wikis and shared online work spaces were also included as potential productivity improvers, although some of these have now been abandoned in preference for newer Twitter-like tools.

The report, however, suggests increased productivity can not be achieved "simply by installing social software". The tools need to be accompanied by management change and commitment.

Dr Gavin Schwarz, Associate Professor at the Australian School of Business, School of Management, UNSW agrees.

"Just because it's a more contemporary form of communication it doesn't change that people still need to be ready and have the right mindset for it," Dr Schwarz says.

"There's an assumption that because people are tweeting socially, [the habit] will automatically transfer to work. Not necessarily. It comes down to this idea that people have to be made more ready for change, regardless of what it is."

He says businesses have also to pay attention to possible generational differences when attempting to integrate social tools at work.

Companies that adopted social media tools early agree, with some previously telling IT Pro new processes needed to be "championed" by chosen users internally before they could gain traction.

Dr Asif Qumer Gill, research fellow in business information systems at the University of Sydney, has just released a paper evaluating the use of social tools in business, including Chatter.

He estimates people spend between 40 and 50 per cent of their working day communicating via email, face-to-face and in meetings, but this is not integrated with the actual work they are doing.

"Email is a very passive way to communicate," Dr Gill says.

Email and meeting times could be reduced if people were allowed to have quick discussions and exchanges from within the software program they are using – say updating a group while commenting on a written report, or obtaining in-line stage approvals for a writing or coding project. The current practice is to leave the work aside, fire off an email program, try to keep track of email communication and later search for approvals and conversations to justify decisions.

"So not only communication can improve [with social media tools] but the quality of work can improve," Dr Gill says.

The report authors estimate between $US900 billion and $1.3 billion ($859 billion to $1.24 billion) of global economic surplus could be "unlocked" through the use of social technologies in private and public sectors.

Two-thirds of that value would come from improved communications and collaboration, however, companies would need to be networked not only technologically, but also behaviourally.

The social utopia is not without risks, however. The report listed identity theft, loss of intellectual property, privacy violations, abuse and damage to reputation as risks derived from the use of social technologies as a business tool, but warned companies that fail to understand their benefits would be at greater risk of having their business model disrupted by the very trend they resist.

The report said companies that stand to gain the most from the social enterprise are those in the technology, professional services, education, media and entertainment, banking, telecommunications and insurance.

Those with lower value potential are in the energy, national governments, pharmaceutical and food and beverage fields.

Email is not likely to disappear altogether, though, says Dr Gill.

"It is not going to be thrown away. But it will be easier to use. Email should be able to be used from [inside] other platforms."